Owen Wilson found doing his own stunts for 'No Escape' "kind of scary" because he worried his harness would break

The 46-year-old actor plays a father trying to get his family to safety in a political uprising in 'No Escape' and admits he couldn't help but think of things going wrong when tackling some tough scenes.

He said: "It was kind of scary doing some of the stuff with jumping from roof to roof.

"We're on a harness, but there's still part of your brain that doesn't want you to just run off the side of a building . . . You always wonder, well, 'What if [the harness] is a little frayed or something?'"

The movie sees Owen's character go from being a regular guy to an action hero, and he insists the transition is possible in his everyday life.

He told the New York Post newspaper's Page Six column: "Ordinary people are capable of really heroic things if they're put into an intense, demanding situation."

He went on to recall a speech given by a Medal of Honour winner at his school who talked about "not setting out to do anything heroic".

He added: "He didn't really have time to think, and acted. Reading about these guys in France on the train subduing that terrorist -- it sounded like the same . . . like they didn't really have time to think about it. They just did it."